Dear Mohammad Heydari ,

A research question is an answerable inquiry into a specific concern or issue. It is the initial step in a research project.You said you are investigating in the Software architecture field specially in Migration from Legacy Software into the Cloud-base infrastructure (Microservices). Thats vague, you have not said anything. What exactly are you working on. For eg. The hypothesis of my thesis was if the fod-selector was capable of detecting edges of MRI brain images when a high pass filter is applied before convolution.

In short your research problem/question should be direct and clear expression which is answerable.

I do believe you need to be more specific. Try to focus on very narrow research problem related to the research area you are investigate. For example you can study the Critical success factors needed to migrate from legacy systems to cloud -base systems or software.

Best Wishes,

I think that you need to focus in a specific problem, really specific. A PhD thesis looks for solving a very specific problem and you should be the person that knows the most about a narrow field. That's why you need to center in a really specific problem.

First of all, ask yourself why you have chosen that topic. Try to answer the question, what at all you are using your research work to address? This will bring out the problem clearly. After that, try reading around the topic from articles with similar topics, and then with the help of what you gather, concentualize your work. This will give you a clear concentual framework. With this, you can now go a head and develop the theoretical framework, and then your way will be very clear.

How to Represent a Problem / Main Question in my research to be as a fundamental theory for my thesis ? For example I'm investigating in the Software architecture field specially in Migration from Legacy Software into the Cloud-base infrastructure (Microservices).

You can frame your research problem / problem statement only when you'd done decent literature review on your research topic i.e. what are the issues surrounding the research problem you try to solve e.g. there are still multi-platform instability issues e.g. immature mesh services or layer 2 network extension, security exposure, lacking developers or operations staff skill set / training etc. to migrate legacy software into cloud-based containers / microservices which can be stateless and span across multi-cloud environments etc.

How you frame your research questions are depending on your research problem and research objectives. Once you have nailed down the research questions, you can form your hypotheses easily for your empirical research. Do note all the research questions you posed must be answer at the end of your research report.

Your research problem and questions can't be or as a fundamental theory of your thesis. As part of your literature review, you should also review what theory / theories / theoretical framework your research should underpin on so that your developed conceptual framework / research model is "grounded" on those theories that can "hold water" and wouldn't be challenged during proposal defense. Wishing you all the best.